Rave from the grave

By Mick Hamer

THIS October, fresh recordings by the great Russian pianist and composer
Sergei Rachmaninoff shot into Billboard magazine’s top ten. It was a
curious turn of events. The recordings were made in a hall just outside Los
Angeles earlier this year, yet Rachmaninoff has been dead for more than 50
years.

The key to Rachmaninoff’s ghostly comeback is a computer-controlled piano and
a series of binary recordings that the pianist made between 1919 and 1929. His
performances were recorded as holes punched in piano rolls, which resembled
rolls of fax paper and served as the floppy discs of the time. The new recording
is the work of Wayne Stahnke, a Los Angeles inventor who is central to the
development of computer-controlled pianos. He took the piano rolls, scanned the
pattern of holes into his computer, and converted the resulting image into data
that can be read by the Bosendorfer SE, the computer-controlled piano he
designed. It was this machine that brought Rachmaninoff back to life this
year.

Rachmaninoff is now available for repeat performances. But don’t expect to
hear him play a Bosendorfer SE—only 33 were ever made and Stahnke owns two
of them. But Stahnke has also converted the performances into files that can be
played on Yamaha’s more widely available Disklavier. He’s even posted a sample
of the conversions on the Web. So if you want to hear Rachmaninoff play an
extract from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumble Bee, all you have
to do is to download it onto a floppy disc and put it in the nearest
Disklavier.

In an age when pop CDs …

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